Crashing issue involving mods - OSX. Seems like a memory issue but unusually severe.

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Hi all! Posting this both to the KSP subreddit and here, hoping someone can help!

I've pretty recently started playing KSP - having known of it for a long time and thought 'that's something I should try someday', I finally got my arse into gear and did so. I've played Orbiter before, albeit not for a couple of years.

Anyway, up until a couple of days ago I had left the game in its completely vanilla form. I wanted to at least learn the basics of the game before diving into mods, but at the same time I was drawing up a big wish list of mods that I wanted to install in due course - based on a number of videos and recommendations and so on. The list got fairly extensive, but that's an aside.

Anyway, time comes when I feel I'm up to trying out some mods. One of the first ones I tried to load into the game was FASA, the mod that adds a whole load of Apollo-era parts.

Quickly to address points raised in the Support Instructions thread - I ensured in all instances that the mods I was attempting to use were up to date and correctly installed. Generally I would have no issue getting the mod to show up in the game, just that the game would crash before too long. I'm aware of the perennial issues involving memory usage on 32-bit versions of the game, but having read up on those issues this seems to me like it's a particularly severe instance of this problem, so I believe it warrants this thread. You'll see further down that I tried to use Active Texture Management and it did not aid the situation.

So - I opened up the game with just FASA installed over the stock install, just to take a look at what I was getting, and I immediately began to get crashes in the VAB, pretty much whenever I'm looking at anything to do with the mod. The bigger rockets - the Saturn V and Nova - invariably produced crashes when I tried to load them from FASA's self-contained save file, but it would also regularly happen that I'd get crashes in the VAB even when just playing around with 3 or 4 FASA parts. No launch of any sort was possible when any FASA part was involved - even if I managed to avoid crashing in the VAB, clicking the launch button would invariably produce a crash. These crashes took the form of a beach-ball-of-death requiring a forced quit of the application.

So I did some reading and learned that what was probably going on was that I was running out of memory. For information, I am on OSX Mavericks (10.9), still, and I'm running it on a mid-2011 13" non-retina MacBook Pro, with (I believe) 4GB of RAM. I am beginning to get the horrible feeling that the computer I'm using just plain isn't up to the task of dealing with hefty mods, but I hope I'm wrong there.

I have tried this with other mods as well. It seems FASA has the most pronounced effect, and I will get these crashes even when FASA is the only mod loaded into the game, but I have also had crashes with other mods such as the SpaceY stuff, Infernal Robotics and others. It does not seem as if mods such as MechJeb, KAS, KIS, KER, DMagic ScanSat, the RCS placement assistant, TweakScale and so on produce any crashes - it seems to be that it's mods that involve new parts that produce these issues.

I've tried a number of things thus far, having found these recommended online in various places. Firstly I tried reducing the texture resolution in the game's settings - this seemed not to have any effect. I also tried running KSP with absolutely zero other applications open - again, didn't seem to change things.

I then tried the 'Active Texture Management' mod - this had a noticeable effect in that it reduced the texture resolution on the FASA parts, but I was still getting crashes pretty much as frequently as before.

I then followed the steps in this video -

- which provides steps for making KSP on OSX a 64-bit app.

This has had the effect of stopping there from being any crashes in the VAB view. I am able to view the biggest rockets FASA has to offer in that view no problem after making the changes in that video. However, I still almost always get a crash when I try to go to launch anything involving FASA parts. Anything bigger than about a Mercury-Redstone sized rocket will produce a crash every single time without exception. This is true no matter how low the texture resolution in the game's settings is.

Stock-parts craft continue to work fine, no matter how big they are.

It's horribly frustrating because I'm itching to exploit the expanded potential these mods have to offer, so I hope people here might be able to help out!